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Monday, March 31, 2014

Hollywood
has rarely produced a trustworthy depiction of historical events. My own
philosophy of historical fiction is that historic events should serve as
background to the conflicts, aspirations, ambitions, betrayals and destiny of
the principal characters in the story. Further, the plot in which these
characters move – or, even better, when these characters move the plot itself –
should not conflict with the historic events, but be in sync with those events.
The principal conflicts should be between the characters, not between the story
and history. I obeyed this rule while writing the Sparrowhawk series, and also my period detective novels.

Hollywood
adhere to such rules. I don’t think it has even formulated them.

Thus
we have such examples as the 1936 Charge of the Light Brigade,
in which the sequence of events of the Indian Mutiny and the Crimean War was
reversed (the war, 1853-1856; the mutiny, 1857). Otherwise it would have required Errol Flynn
to survive the Charge and travel to India to rescue Olivia de Havilland from
Surat Khan's filthy clutches. History was tweaked, but not by much, to
accommodate the plot. The lavish 1968 Tony Richardson version, however, was a
plotless anti-war statement, complete with animated period political cartoons
and caricatured Victorian figures. And, because it was an anti-war statement,
it was gorier than its predecessor.

There
are innumerable films and TV series grounded in history. I could write a book
about the subject. I might do that, some day. What looms largest in my mind,
however, and at the moment, is David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962).
At the age of 17, when I first saw it shortly after its release, I was
literally smitten by it. It got me to read up on World War One. Although I
entertained doubts about its accuracy, it was a grand scale film, one of the
last. My positive appraisal of it gradually diminished over the years, the more
I learned about how and why the Allied campaign in the Middle East was
conducted.

Clinching
my final negative appraisal was Efraim Karsh's August 9th, 2013
article, "Seven
Pillars of Fiction," originally published in the Wall Street Journal
and reprinted by the Middle East Forum. It concluded that Lawrence was indeed a
consummate charlatan, and that the "Arab Revolt" was a fiction
invented by one ambitious Arab potentate and cashed in on by another, the Saudi
"king," Abdul Aziz ibn Saud. Saud sat out the war and did not
participate in any of the warfare conducted against the Turks by Lawrence under
the aegis of Hussein ibn Ali, the putative "Sharif of Mecca," and Prince
Faisal, one of his sons. Hussein also sought the title, "King of the Arabs."
I provide many more details of this pragmatic episode of "nation
building" in my detective novel, The
Black Stone.

It
also led me to the conclusion that David Lean, one of the finest film directors
to ever peer through a camera lens, was just another ingenuous dupe of the
legend of Lawrence of Arabia. At the time, questioning the stature of T.E.
Lawrence would have been treated as slanderous heresy. His film, which I still
maintain is a magnificent example of what films could be, was inspired by and produced as a result of the success
of Terence Rattigan's 1960 play, Ross, which
was closer to the truth in its depiction of Lawrence than was Lawrence of Arabia.

I've
often written about Hollywood's Leftist, anti-American crusade, and its
penchant for obliging the sensibilities of offended Muslims in the past, for
example, here,
here,
here,
here,
and most recently, here,
about the Disney/ABC
Family Group's capitulation to the demands of the Hamas-connected Council
of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
that it cancel a TV program, "Alice
in Arabia." Nick Provenzo wrote about the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh
in 2006, why Hollywood had little or nothing to say about it, and why Hollywood
changed the villains from
Muslims to "neo-fascists" in the production of Tom Clancy's novel, The Sum of All Fears. Wikepedia
has the "low-down" on why the villains' identities were changed. The
screenwriter, Dan Pyne, protesteth too much.

The
Disney/ABC decision garnered little or no mention in the mainstream media, nor
did the announcement that Disney/ABC would work with Muslim screenwriters to
produce future programs that would not offend Muslim feelings or invite chares
of blasphemy or "slandering" the good name of Islam. The Muslim
Public Affairs Council (MPAC),
a Muslim Brotherhood front group, announced also that it would provide
Disney/ABC with this "talent."

That
boils down to: MPAC wonks voluntarily installed by Disney/ABC as paid censors
of its output. It means: Disney/ABC is
willing to submit to Islamic Sharia law, and avoid any criticism of Islam, and
the Muslim wonks will be there to ensure that Disney/ABC complies.

(I
have sent this column to the executives of Disney/ABC Family Group. It would be
interesting to know that they have read the MPAC links provided in the
foregoing paragraphs – that is, if they wish to bother to learn with whom they
are partnering. As for the history of CAIR, that's pretty much public knowledge,
and I'm sure those executives know the history, too.)

Have
Hollywood studios no shame? Apparently not, if shame is regret for betraying
one's freedom for some tenuous notion of "security." Hollywood has
been submitting to all kinds of pressure for decades: to federal pressure,
Communist pressure, union pressure, feminist pressure, "gay rights"
pressure – and Islamic pressure. This is aside from the Hays
Office of censors,
which exercised its own moral arm-twisting
on Hollywood back in the 1930's.

Islamic
dhimmitude is just the latest chapter in Hollywood's submission to threats, regulations,
and "social pressure" to produce what is acceptable film fare at the
moment. While the Hays Office expired in the 1950's, and beginning in the
1960's the Production Code succumbed to the Left's film philosophy that
anything goes and the only stricture is something called "parental
guidance," Hollywood remains in thrall to whomever fills the vacuum of
"moral uplift" and shakes a vigorous fist at Tinsel Town.

It's
generally thought that it doesn't matter if Hollywood succumbs to
self-censorship, to government regulation and censorship, or even to Islamic
censorship because, as one reader of a Breitbart
article on the tapping of Kevin Spacey to play Winston Churchill in a
future production, remarked, "Rational people have the ability to realize
it's just a fictional show and don't change their opinions on whom to vote for
because of a TV show." (This was in reference to Spacey's hit TV series, "House
of Cards.")

Here
I expand on my reply to the reader's comments:

Rational people don't denigrate,
debunk, or satirize their political affiliations or their political principles.
Nor do they wish to see them denigrated, debunked, or mocked – not unless they
think it doesn't matter, that they'll come out on top, and people don’t take
ideas seriously anyway, they're just a bunch of goofballs.

Kevin Spacey is basically a nihilist.
He can dramatize the truth about how Washington works, and believes telling the
truth won’t matter. He thinks his Democratic Party will still triumph and
continue to put the screws to the American people. He counts on people
thinking: Well, it's only TV, it's only actors, and sets, and scripts, no one
will take it seriously. It's just "entertainment."

However, fiction and film have a
more powerful effect on people's minds and the course of politics than you
might realize, especially if they're well done, as "House of Cards"
was. If they didn't, no one would bother writing political fiction or
making political films. Why did Oliver Stone make JFK or any of his other political films? To influence viewers. Why
do leftists and conservatives blow a gasket when any of Ayn Rand's novels are
mentioned? It's because they're afraid her novels will influence readers by
showing the evil of statism and the consequences of selflessness. Why did
Khomenei issue a death fatwa on Salman Rushdie and call for the banning of The Satanic Verses? Because he and his
mullahs believed his book would damage Islam, so they called it
"blasphemous." People do respond to political films, novels, and
satire whether or not they realize they're just fiction, and their producers
and directors know this.

This
is why the executives behind Disney/ABC's cancellation of "Alice in Arabia"
at the behest of terrorist front group, CAIR, don't think it matters. It's just
a TV show, people won’t take it seriously, and won’t miss it if they never see
it. And, besides, we really don’t want to get the Saudis mad at us. Why, they
could buy a controlling interest in Disney/ABC. That would be too much. We're
willing to cooperate. And our female executives might not want to wear head
scarves or Hefty trash bags. We don’t want people thinking ill of the Saudis,
or of Islam.

Not
allowing TV audiences to see it, however, misses the point. It was a conscious
decision to cancel the show. It's as significant an action – moral cowardice –
as if a "Gang Busters"
radio drama from the 1930's was cancelled on the complaint of Al Capone or
Frank Nitti some other gangster, because the show allegedly
"stereotyped" gangsters or gave people the "wrong idea"
about the character of gangsters. But the truth about Islam is that it is
brutal, primitive, and totalitarian in nature. Saudi Arabia is a theocratic
monarchy determined to perpetuate itself and corrupt the West, in particular,
America. King Abdullah is a grosser caricature, physically and metaphorically,
of a gangster than was Al Capone. Forget Batman's nemeses, the Joker, the
Riddler and the Penguin. King Abdullah can't be exaggerated.

What
happened to the initial motive to produce a show that depicts the efforts of an
American girl kidnapped by Saudis to escape her captors? It was regretted, suppressed,
and discarded. Disney/ABC waved the white flag. Please don’t accuse us of
"Islamophobia"!

To
date, Hollywood has not produced a single film or TV series in which the
villains are Muslims or Muslim terrorists, not even 24. It's usually
"Serbian" nationalists, or South Africa-based neo-Nazis, or some
other concocted terrorist group with designs on the U.S. But never Muslims. If
Muslims appear on 24 or in some film,
they're usually portrayed as blameless "innocents." Daniel
Greenfield, in his January 24th column, "Hollywood's
Muslim Lies," noted about The
Sum of All Fears":

Its writer
Dan Pyne dismissed Islamic terrorism as a “cliché”; even though
a plot can’t be a cliché when it never appears in movies, only in real life.
Pyne however found a more realistic villain. “I think, there was some
neo-nationalist activity in Holland, and there was stuff going on in Spain and
in Italy. So it seemed like a logical and lasting idea that would be
universal.”

Later,
about cliché-burdened Pyne, Greenfield wrote;

Instead Dan Pyne went on to write
a remake of The Manchurian Candidate
in which Communist China was replaced by the “Manchurian Corporation”.
He’s currently working on a movie featuring a Syrian rescue worker who gets
mistaken for a terrorist while trying to save lives during Hurricane Katrina. It’s
a cliché, but it’s the kind of cliché that Hollywood likes.

If a movie is made about
September 11 a decade from now, the villains will probably be Serbian
nationalists. It would be a cliché to have 19 Muslim hijackers murder 3,000
people. And then the camera will linger meaningfully on a Muslim rescuer
wrongly taken into custody by a bigoted NYPD cop who is overlooking the real
Serbian/Dutch neo-nationalist corporate villains.

The
original 1962 Manchurian Candidate is a
taut, suspenseful, knuckle-chewing, unabashedly political film starring Frank
Sinatra and Laurence Harvey. Its IMDB synopsis reads: "A former Korean War
POW is brainwashed by Communists into becoming a political assassin." The
2004 "remake" stars
Denzel Washington (an otherwise fine actor, but who possesses poor judgment
about what kinds of films he appears in) in the Frank Sinatra role and is a
convoluted, unabashedly politically correct, anti-business mess that blames,
not a Communist plot to seize the White House, but a high-tech arms dealer, the
"Manchurian Corporation." The purposeful butchery of the original story
was called a "reimagining."

"Reimagine"
the American Revolution as a French plot to install George Washington as
"George the First" of America, or the Civil War as a British plot to
dissolve the United States to perpetuate slavery. Or, "reimagine"
American history as told by Howard Zinn and "Common Core." And how
many times can anyone retell Custer's Last Stand, or "reimagine" The Front Page, The Big Clock, and The Four
Feathers to fit the politically correct sensibility of the moment? I
guess until there's as little connection between an original film and its
latest "remake" as between a trumpet swan and a tomtit.

Finally,
there's that old reliable government-business partnership to fall back on when
looking for extra revenue and capitalization, otherwise known as fascism. Dreamworks
went to China. The Los Angeles Times reported in February 2012:

The creator of the
"Shrek" movies said it was forming Oriental DreamWorks, a joint
venture with China Media Capital and Shanghai Media Group in concert
with Shanghai Alliance Investment – an investment arm of the
Shanghai municipal government – to establish a family entertainment
company in China.

With an initial investment of
$330 million, the Shanghai studio would develop original Chinese animated
and live-action movies, TV shows and other entertainment catering to the China
market. The deal was among several business ventures announced in downtown Los
Angeles during an economic forum attended by visiting Chinese Vice President Xi
Jinping, who is widely expected to be the country's next leader….

The
new studio, which has been recruiting some staff in Hollywood, plans to begin
operations later this year and could eventually surpass the size of DreamWorks'
headquarters, which employs more than 2,000 people, Chief Executive
Jeffrey Katzenberg said in an interview.

You
can bet that Dreamworks China will not be producing animated films about the
freedom of speech, the right of political protest, free enterprise, and
individual rights. No, it will be producing more "Kung Fu Panda"
films, and maybe a "reimagined" "Shrek" as Chairman Mao.

It
had to be the natural course of moral collapse that Hollywood, dominated by the
anti-American, anti-business, anti-esthetics, post-deconstructionist Left,
would ally itself with anti-freedom, totalitarian Islam. It comports with the Muslim
Brotherhood's agenda of sabotaging the West from within. The Brotherhood's May 22nd, 1991 memorandum
details how especially America can be conquered and made Sharia complaint. The Investigative Project
reported:

Written sometime in 1987 but not
formally published until May 22, 1991, Akram's 18-page document listed the
Brotherhood’s 29 likeminded "organizations of our friends" that
shared the common goal of dismantling American institutions and turning the U.S.
into a Muslim nation. These "friends" were identified
by Akram and the Brotherhood as groups that could help convince Muslims
"that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and
destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable
house by their hands ... so that ... God's religion [Islam] is made victorious
over all other religions."

Thus the “grand jihad” [….]
envisioned was not a violent one involving bombings and shootings, but rather a
stealth
(or “soft”) jihad aiming to impose Islamic
law (Sharia) over every region of the earth by incremental,
non-confrontational means, such as working to
“expand the observant Muslim base”; to “unif[y] and direc[t] Muslims' efforts”;
and to “present Islam as a civilization alternative.” At its heart, Akram's
document details a plan to conquer and Islamize the United States – not as
an ultimate objective, but merely as a stepping stone toward the larger goal of
one day creating “the global
Islamic state.”

Hollywood
is but one miserable wing of the "house" the Brotherhood and its
Islamic terrorist allies wish to bring down and convert to their own brand of
totalitarianism. Just as the Soviets infiltrated our government and our culture
in the 1930's, including Hollywood, just as Hollywood obeyed Washington and
refrained from producing movies during World War II critical of our
totalitarian ally, Josef Stalin's Soviet Russia, Islam has made a key beachhead
in Hollywood, to guide its Leftist denizens in the Sharia way.

Ultimately,
it will not be the Brotherhood's hands that will help to destroy America, but
the pragmatic, amoral, manicured hands of Hollywood, busy
"reimagining" it.

Charissa Gilmore,
Vice President, Office of the President, Disney/ABC Television Group

Robert Iger,
Chairman and CEO

27 March 2014

Re: "Alice in Arabia"

Sirs/Mesdames:

It has come to my attention
that, under pressure from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which
has links to Hamas, a terrorist organization which CAIR refuses to condemn,
your organization has shelved or is "not moving forward with" an
upcoming drama pilot, "Alice
in Arabia."As a published
novelist, author, and columnist, I find this frankly disturbing, although I
should not be surprised. Given the nature of the story line of "Alice
in Arabia," about an American teen trying to escape the brutal,
primitive social conditions which exist in Saudi Arabia, a theocratic monarchy,
this is a fact which Hollywood and the news media have evaded or repressed for
decades.

What disturbs me is how easy it
was for CAIR
to raise the alarm about "stereotyping" Islam and its
totalitarian character and how swiftly Disney/ABC capitulated. An ABC Family
spokesman told The
Hollywood Reporter that the controversy, which was instigated by CAIR, is
on record as saying that the project was "not conducive to the creative
process."Your organization's
craven surrender to Islamists is contemptible, and reprehensible, as well, for
it simply encourages others engaged in the "creative process" to
adopt a politically correct line of thinking, which is not "creative"
at all.

Your capitulation
is reminiscent of the time, during World War II, Hollywood caved to Roosevelt
administration pressure and refrained from making any movies critical of our
ally, Stalin's Soviet Russia, fresh from the show trials and the Moscow-orchestrated
famine in the Ukraine, among other depredations.

What is worse, I think, is your
voluntary collaboration with the Muslim
Public Affairs Council (MPAC),
which will "provide screenwriters for future productions by the Disney/ABC
Television Group." This organization also has ties with Islamic terrorist
organizations, such as the Muslim
Brotherhood. The Communists and
Nazis also had "political officers" in their bureaucracies and
business entities to ensure "goodthink." This was otherwise called
censorship. It still means the same thing, even in CGI-happy Hollywood. You people can't even make a biblical epic
without turning it into an environmental impact statement.

It is doubtful whether Disney or
ABC Family would ever decide to produce, for example, We Three Kings, which is about an American entrepreneur pitted
against a Saudi sheik (with the State Department's sanction to kill the
entrepreneur hero), or The Black Stone,
set in 1930, which is about a Brotherhood killer on the loose in San Francisco.
Nor is it likely Disney/ABC would ever think of producing my Sparrowhawk series of novels set in
Virginia and England in the pre-Revolutionary period, unless it was turned into
a musical with a full LGBT cast, given Disney's adulterations of classic novels
in the past and its saccharine family fare.

You people are not doing America
any favors by becoming dhimmis, an
Islamic term for people who have been conquered and made to submit to Islam
(which means, submission).

You would be doing the country a favor by going ahead with "Alice
in Arabia" and telling MPAC that the deal is off. I shall be publishing
this missive as an open letter on my political/cultural website, Rule of
Reason. It will also appear on other websites. Be on the lookout for it.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

This
is not a new subject. It would be to the mainstream media. To the dhimmitudal
denizens of this particular subject of enquiry, Islam, as a "religion of
peace" and a belief system, is above reproach, even when its true believers
and activists are blowing up non-believers by the dozens, hundreds, and even
thousands, or machine-gunning them or taking machetes to them. Islam is
untouchable. To question its nature leaves news media denizens with dropped
jaws one can hear thud on the floor. It leaves them aghast and in horror.

To
them, Islam can do no wrong. There's nothing wrong with it that a little
patience and interfaith dialogue can't resolve. It's a needless cultural clash
that can be reconciled peacefully. A negotiated settlement is possible. Muslims
just want to be left alone and not be stereotyped or mocked or defamed. All the
mullahs and imams need to do is put a leash on Islam's hotheads to curb their
youthful – and oft times middle-aged – exuberance, and then everyone can grab a
ribbon and dance around the Maypole of Diversity to the tune of a Tiny Tim song.

But
the pathology inherent in doctrinal Islam – and that which inhabits its passive
and aggressive adherents – has been discussed in the past in non-mainstream
media, sometimes effectively, sometimes not. For example, Soren Kern, in his
Gatestone article of March 24th, "UK: Child
Sex Slavery, Multiculturalism and Islam," takes to task both the idea
of multiculturalism and the British authorities on the sex-grooming Muslim
gangs that have apparently been preying on non-Muslim school girls for at least
twenty years.

Kern's
article is mostly a discussion of Peter McLoughlin's exhaustive report, "Easy
Meat: Multiculturalism, Islam and Child Sex Slavery," which details how
officials in England and Wales were aware of rampant child grooming – the process
by which sexual predators befriend and build trust with children in order to
prepare them for abuse – by Muslim gangs since at least 1988, with the knowledge of the authorities.
The report is 333 pages long and worth reading – as long as you have a supply
of Valium on hand and are not susceptible to high blood pressure. Kern writes:

Rather than take steps to protect
British children, however, police, social workers, teachers, neighbors,
politicians and the media deliberately downplayed the severity of the crimes
perpetrated by the grooming gangs to avoid being accused of
"Islamophobia" or "racism."

But
the festering, metastasizing problem couldn't be contained and hushed up for
much longer.

The conspiracy of silence was not
broken until November 2010, when it was leaked that police in Derbyshire had
carried out an undercover investigation—dubbed Operation Retriever—and arrested
13 members of a Muslim gang for grooming up to 100 underage girls for sex.

Shortly thereafter, the Times
of Londonpublished
the results of a groundbreaking investigation into the sexual exploitation
and internal trafficking of girls in the Midlands and the north of England. In
January 2011, the newspaper reported that in 17 court cases since 1997 in which
groups of men were prosecuted for grooming 11 to 16 year old girls, 53 of the
56 men found guilty were Asian, 50 of them Muslim, and just three were white.

The
overwhelming number of sex-grooming gangs are Muslim in makeup.

One of the defining features of
child grooming is the ethnic/cultural homogeneity of the gang members, and the
refusal of other members of their community to speak out about them or to
condemn their behavior. According to the report, the gangs are often made up of
brothers and members of their extended family, many from Pakistan, who take
part in the grooming and/or rape of the schoolgirls.

The report states that grooming
gangs target young girls, aged between 11 and 16, because the gang members want
virgins and girls who are free of sexual diseases. "Most of the men buying
sex with the girls have Muslim wives and they don't want to risk
infection," the report states. "The younger you look, the more
saleable you are."

I
left this edited comment on Kern's Gatestone article. It raises the issue of
the criminal pathology of the perpetrators and of their "ethnic/cultural
homogeneity":

One must ask oneself: If Islam
and Muslims consider women the lesser sex, and infidel women as uncovered meat
to be consumed by men in the crime of rape, and that "that 'women are no
more worthy than a lollipop that has been dropped on the ground,'" why are
Muslim men in these gangs attracted to them? Shouldn't these Muslims, if they
are "true believers," be revolted by the prospect of such a
physically close proximity as it must occur in sex? Has any one of these
barbarians ever asked himself that question, or asked it of others of his ilk?
The answer to those questions I think can be found in the fact that Islam is
merely a rationale for the criminally minded. Islamic ideology inculcates in
the unquestioning a sense of pseudo-superiority of the faithful over anyone
outside its boundaries.

The alleged inferiority of women,
Muslim or non-Muslim, which doctrinally sanctions especially rape, allows these
criminals to put a "moral" cast on their actions. They claim they are
acting out the tenets of their religion, when, in fact, their motives are more
insidiously pathological and have nothing to do with the creed and ideology. It
goes beyond these criminals' taste for the "forbidden."

Whether these criminals can be
deemed sociopaths or psychopaths, is a moot question. Islam inculcates and
fosters the pathology. It is the only major creed I am aware of that sanctions
crime. The murderers of Lee Rigby claimed they were being consistent with
Islam. There's no reason to doubt them on that count. The child rapists of
these Muslim grooming gangs are also being consistent, but because sex is the
object, their libidos have been twisted out of all recognizable human shape.

In "grooming" and
raping these young women and children, they are making a statement: We're
criminals, and we're conquering your country by raping your women. Islam says
it's okay, it blesses our criminality, but it's what we want to do anyway.

No excuses should be admitted in
the prosecution of their crimes. Religion should not be admitted as a defense.
It isn't in Western law, but that seems to be changing in Britain,
given the news that Sharia will now be considered a legitimate means of settling
disputes and inheritance
issues in
British courts.

Islam,
horrific an ideology and creed as it is without recalling its 1,400-year-old
catalogue of crime (call it a "rap sheet"), serves as a convenient
mask of piety for the recidivist criminal. Instead of claiming, "The Devil
made me do it," he says, "Allah made me do it. Allah expects me to do
it. Allah commands me to do it. So, I
am beyond moral judgment. You have no right to judge or punish me."

Treating
the systematic assault on non-Muslim women in Britain, Sweden
(Stockholm
has the highest incidence of Muslim rapes), Norway, Denmark, Belgium and
Germany, among other
European or Western countries, as an expression of Islamic pathology is
beginning to seep into the thinking of individuals searching for an explanation
for the phenomenon.

As with most cults, research
indicates, progressive disassociation with reality is a common trait. To the
rational mind, words on paper contain no power in themselves, but are assigned
significance by the observer. One may call the book a "Bible" or a
"Manifesto" or a "Koran" or the "Times of
London", all are simply words on paper. To the mind of the cultist, it is
the document itself that has power. To an Islamist, such as yourself, the
internalization of the Muhammedian dogma and the "Koran" motivates
and animates your life to the exclusion of rational thought processes.

Criminal
actions, after all, are not symptomatic of rational behavior or rational
thinking. A rational quest for the causes and effects of criminal behavior is
not going to discover "rational" causes. But this does not stop some
observers from painting irrational Muslim behavior in subjectivist terms.
Criminals and their apologists always have an excuse for crime. To wit, Discover
the Networks profiled one apologist, Natana DeLong-Bas, an apologist for
Saudi Wahhabism, who explained why Islam has a "bad rep":

In a similar vein, DeLong-Bas contends
that “extremism does not stem from the Islamic religion,” but rather from “the
political conditions in the Islamic world, like the Palestinian issue … [the
issue of] Iraq, and the American government's tying [the hands of] the U.N.
[and preventing it] from adopting any resolution against Israel.” These, the
professor maintains, “have definitely added to the Muslim youth's state of
frustration, which then pushes them to—as they understand it—help their
brothers do away with the aggression against them, in the various Islamic
countries.... That is why I believe that religion has nothing to do with this.”

This
is the "academic" version of the "Officer Krupke"
number from West Side Story.
Jihadists are "depraved because they're deprived," and haven’t been
raised in a "normal home." "They're "misunderstood." And
etc. Islam has nothing to do with the violence; it's unfair to ascribe to Islam
all the murders, rapes, assaults, and destruction committed in its name – as a Koranic imperative.

Barbara
J. Stock, in her November 2005 article, "The pathology of an
Islamic Mind," which discussed why an unsuccessful female Muslim
suicide bomber was willing to kill Muslim children as well as infidel children:

This abnormal mind is the mind of
our enemy. It is the mind of a woman who can place herself next to playing
toddlers and attempt to blow them up and tear their bodies apart with a bomb
containing ball-bearings. It is the mind of a man who can drive a car filled
with explosives into a crowd of children eating ice cream with their fathers
and kill them. Muslims say that this must be done in the name of Allah for the
advancement of Islam….

These warped minds are unable to
accept that it is Islam that is responsible for the bombings and the slaughter.
Always able to put the blame elsewhere for all of Islam's crimes and problems,
Muslims eagerly accept any and all excuses for the sins of Islam, no matter how
illogical those excuses may be. If their warped minds can't accept the fact
that their "religion of peace" is to blame, the blame is pushed off
on the Jews, or justified by claiming it was Islam that was attacked first.
Denial is their first line of defense….

Sadly, this is what happens to
the human mind when it must be constantly bent and twisted to accept the
unreasonable.

But
suppose one accepts the unreasonable because it comports with one's
unreasonable expectations in life, such as sex with anyone one wishes to have
it with, regardless of the other party's willingness or consent? Islam is
eminently "unreasonable" – that is, irrational – and if one is told
from infancy on up through adolescence and adulthood that Islamic logic is
incompatible with infidel or Western logic (in the buffet of relativist
philosophy, there's Musim logic, and capitalist logic, and Nazi logic, and two
dozen more brands of logic), it "justifies" one's criminal behavior.
One's wanting the unearned is justification enough to just take it.

Islam, Allah, Mohammed, the Koran (among other things) are thus in
the Muslim psyche to be an inviolable circle of sacred objects to be protected
from anything perceived to be negative, whether it's a physical attack or a critique
or mockery, or even thoughts. Anything perceived this way is physicalized as an
enemy, and the response is biochemical, pre-rational defense.

With Muslims and their Islam, we are thus not dealing with a
rational mind here, but with the pre-rational mind.

A
"pre-rational mind" is that of a prehistorical farmer who ascribes to
deities the success or failure of his harvests and the vagaries of the weather.
He is seeking a comprehensible reason for why things happen. His descendents
will discover reason and rationality and science and discard the deities and
establish a fealty to reality. A criminal mind, however, is not only not
"pre-rational," but non-rational and anti-rational. Things just
happen, things just exist, and such a mind fundamentally isn't interested in
crediting cause-and-effect to anything. Reality is incomprehensible, but that
doesn't worry him. Reason? Reality? Free will? Rights?

The closing of the Muslim mind…
is rooted in Ash’arite theology, which denies the God-given human powers of
reason and free will. This is precisely the opposite of Christian doctrine, which says that personhood is defined by
the powers of reason and free will….
(Italics WND's)

“When I read the account of creation in the Quran,
the first thing that jumped out at me was the fact that man was not made in the
image and likeness of God. In Islam, it’s blasphemous to suggest in any way
that man is like God or can be compared to God,” said Reilly. “The closing of
the Muslim mind occurred over a struggle concerning the role of reason in
Islam, its relationship to revelation and ultimately to Allah…."

Reilly then introduces the metaphysical chaos
inculcated by Islam metaphysics and cosmology.

“What made this worse,” explained Reilly, “is that the metaphysics
behind the delegitimization of reason is the thought that Allah is not only the
first cause – the primary cause – but He’s the only cause for everything.” According
to this school, there are no secondary causes for creatures or actions. This
means fire doesn’t burn cotton, God directly burns the cotton; acorns don’t
grow into oak trees; animals and human beings don’t beget offspring; man-made
machines don’t heat or cool our buildings; and no human persons can choose
their own actions.

“Denying cause and effect in the natural world makes the world
incomprehensible – unintelligible,” said Reilly. “But anyone who would suggest
that natural law has a role in the world would be accused of shirk blasphemy,
of somehow demeaning God’s omnipotence.

“In addition to that, the world is constituted by these time-space
atoms that in themselves have no nature, but they are agglomerated in any
instant directly by the will of God to make something. The fact that acorns
grow into oak trees has nothing to do with the nature of an acorn or oak tree,”
said Reilly. “This process and all other acts are discreet and independent acts
by God and anyone who says that an acorn grows into an oak tree because of its
nature would, again, be committing blasphemy.”

So, if God – if Allah – is directly responsible for all acts, then
several premises follow for the classical Western thinker: (1) No human acts
could be morally wrong; (2) God is directly making some persons Jews, some
Christians, some Hindus, others Mormons, still others atheists and so on; (3)
Therefore, humans who don’t convert to Islam must be doing God’s will; (4) God
would have to be the cause of all conflicts; and (5) God would have to be the
author of contradiction, confusion and chaos.

To these objections, Reilly replied, “Ah, but see, you are
applying logic to Allah, Who’s above it all.

“And since God is above reason and acts for no reasons, neither
can one understand what God does and God Himself becomes unintelligible.
Therefore, reality recedes from the Muslim mind. This is what accounts for the
dysfunctional cultures you see primarily in the Middle East,” said Reilly.
“This is a product of the Ash’arite Kalam, the school of theology for the
majority of Sunni Muslims. It predominates in the Middle East, Pakistan and
South Asia. So if you wonder why there’s so much unreasonable behavior, it’s
simply because reason has lost its status as a normative guide to ethical
action.”

As an atheist, I cite this remarkable exposition without endorsing
Reilly's Christian premises. However, Reilly has made what I think is a key
identification of what moves Islamic jihadists of all stripes: from the killer
jihadists to the grooming gangs. Muslim criminal minds – of the members of the
Muslim grooming gangs of Britain and other countries – act on what they
rationalize is Allah's will, and that is just fine with them, because it is
what they want to do anyway. They have been taught – and they never bothered to
question what they've been taught – that there is no such thing as the earned or the unearned, just things that people
have for no comprehensible reason and which they want and whose origins they
don’t wish to fathom. To them, the necessity of thought is a fiction.

Their metaphysical modus
operandi is to evade reality and the trader principle that governs most
human relationships, a principle that recognizes the reality of those
relationships. They know what they do is evil, but evil is what they think universally
governs men's thinking and actions, so they attach no moral disapprobation to
their own actions, and don’t think anyone else should, either, especially not
their victims. The women and girls they rape exist for them to fulfill Allah's
ends, that is all.

Their minds are neither slothful nor lethargic. They can plan
their crimes. But their intelligence is feral. A predator detects and exploits its
prey's weaknesses. This can also be said of the "cultural and
civilizational" jihad being waged against the West, as well of the
grooming gangsters.

Knowing that they are evil – while at the same time claiming that Allah
determines what is evil and what is good – and that what they do is evil, these gangs wish to humiliate,
degrade, soil, pervert, and ultimately destroy the good. That is their claim to
the efficacy of their Islamic evil. That is the claim of every mullah and imam
and jihadist killer. It is the will of Allah; he puts the uncovered meat before
them, and they take it. It is unspoiled. We shall spoil it.

Islam reduces all Muslims to ciphers, to interchangeable manqués.
The definable criminal among them consequently occupy a rung below that occupied
by the passive manqués; they are literally and definably subhuman. Can they be
deemed sociopaths, or psychopaths?

One of the outstanding lines from the film Gladiator
is spoken in the beginning, before a Roman army attacks a tribe of barbarians:
"What we do in life, echoes in eternity."

I would add: What we don’t do – such as think – also follows us in
life.

Is there a clinical name for the pathology of men
who refuse to think?

Edward Cline, American Novelist

Edward Cline was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1946. After graduating from high school (in which he learned nothing of value) and a stint in the Air Force, he pursued his ambition to become a novelist. His first detective novel, First Prize, was published in 1988 by Mysterious Press/Warner Books, and his first suspense novel, Whisper the Guns, was published in 1992 by The Atlantean Press. First Prize was republished in 2009 by Perfect Crime. The Sparrowhawk series of novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period has garnered critical acclaim (but not yet from the literary establishment) and universal appreciation from the reading public, including parents, teachers, students, scholars, and adult readers who believe that American history has been abandoned or is misrepresented by a government-dominated educational establishment. He is dedicated to Objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason in all matters.